Court overturns Alex Murdaugh's murder convictions and orders new trial
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The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk with Aviva Insurance. Now we're going to turn to this shocking development yesterday evening when we heard that the disgraced US attorney Alex Murdoch's conviction for the 2021 double murders of his son and his wife was overturned. This was a unanimous decision by the South Carolina Supreme Court. The justice agreed that the jury at Murdoch's 2023 trial was improperly influenced by the actions of the county clerk, Rebecca Hill. Well, here to tell us more is US journalist Sarah Firth. Sarah, thanks for being with us. We all followed this case. I mean, if we didn't follow it when it was happening at the time, we certainly saw the Netflix documentary or listened to a podcast about it.
Where does it stand today?
Yes, it's the story that was watched around the world. And Claire, that's because the Murdochs, they're this legal dynasty in rural South Carolina where the murders happened. For any listeners who haven't followed every sort of twist of the case, Alec Murdoch was... accused of killing his wife Maggie and 22-year-old son Paul. They were shot dead on the family's hunting estate. Now, prosecutors argued he'd killed them at a moment his life was collapsing. He was about to be exposed for financial crimes. And there was this damning piece of evidence, which was a video his son took that placed Alex at the scene of the crime. But you have the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously overturning his 2023 murder conviction, citing that shocking jury interference by court clerk Rebecca Hill.
They said she had put her fingers on the scales of justice. She'd had contact reportedly with jurors that had improperly influenced them. And the court saying that that denied him his constitutional right to a fair trial. Really important to note though, Claire, this doesn't mean that he is walking free. It means that those life sentences have been vacated for the guilty verdicts for the murders of his wife and son. Those have been reversed. But he remains in prison because he also pled guilty in a separate trial to dozens of state and federal financial crimes. So he's currently serving a 27 and 40 year sentence for those crimes. And the prosecutors have said that they are going to be aggressively investigating
seeking to retry Alex for the murders of Maggie and Paul.
So we may have to go through all of this again with another trial, which I'm sure is music to the ears of the Netflix executives who will undoubtedly be following this too. But let's go back to Rebecca Hill, this county clerk of the court. Can we go through what she is alleged to have done, Sarah? Because she was hoping to get a book out of this. Now that didn't happen in the end. But talk us through the charges against her.
So they're looking right now at the fact that she had made these comments during her work as the court clerk to the jurors who she'd had contact with throughout the trial, talking about his credibility, asking them to look at his body language. interference that only came to light fully once the case had been trialed and the decision reached.
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